Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Today the G8 came out with a consensus statement on how to combat climate change but, dear bunnies, Eli looks at a India's National Action Plan on Climate Change. It is short as such things go, a mere 6 pages with a more technical annex of 43 pages. It starts by stating somewhat plainly that

India is faced with the challenge of sustaining its rapid economic growth while dealing with the global threat of climate change. This threat emanates from accumulated greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, anthropogenically generated through long term and intensive industrial growth and high consumption lifestyles in developed countries. While engaged with the international community to collectively and cooperatively deal with this threat, India needs a national strategy to firstly, adapt to climate change and secondly, to further enhance the ecological sustainability of India's development path.

The NAPCC emphasized carbon mitigation through sustainable development which protects the poor, demand management and use of appropriate technologies. There are eight national missions:

Increased climate research including research on impacts and new technology development

The government has created an advisory council chaired by the Prime Minister which puts this effort at the highest level. Obviously India takes man made climate change seriously. The technical annex starts by looking at the IPCC AR4

The Fourth Assessment report of the IPCC concluded from direct observations of changes in temperature, sea level, and snow cover in the northern hemisphere during 1850 to the present that the warming of the earth's climate system is unequivocal. The global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 has increased from a pre-industrial value of about 280 ppm to 379 ppm in 2005. Multi-model averages show that the temperature increases during 2090-2099 relative to 1980-1999 may range from 1.1 to 6.4 D and sea level rise from 0.18 to 0.59 meters. These could lead to impacts on freshwater availability, oceanic acidification, food production, flooding of coastal areas and increased burden of vector borne and water borne diseases associated with extreme weather events.

They look for strategies which aid development simultaneously

It is imperative to identify measures that promote our development objectives while also yielding co-benefits for addressing climate change effects. Cost-effective energy efficiency and energy conservation measures are of particular importance in this connection. Similarly , development of clean energy technologies, though primarily designed to promote energy security, can also generate large benefits in terms of reducing carbon emissions. many health related local pollution controls can also generate significant co benefits in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. This document identifies specific opportunities to simultaneously advance India's development and climate related objectives of adaptation and GHG mitigation

14 comments:

Anonymous
said...

"Multi-model averages show....."

The models have never accurately predicted anything and are incapable of doing so. To divert precious resources on this basis is idiocy. It will lead to widespread additional deaths, just like the biofuels debacle.

The models have never accurately predicted anything and are incapable of doing so. To divert precious resources on this basis is idiocy. It will lead to widespread additional deaths, just like the biofuels debacle.

"These analytical and numerical results raise a number of troubling issues. If current global atmospheric models continue to use the hydrostatic equations and increase their resolution while reducing their dissipation accordingly, the unbounded growth will start to appear. On the other hand, if non-hydrostatic models are used at these resolutions, the growth will be bounded, but extremely fast with the solution deviating very quickly from reality due to any errors in the initial data or numerical method."

The Browning and Kreiss paper concerns theoretical limits on the resolution of climate models, which have not yet been reached. That is, if you increase the resolution, you will increase the accuracy of the dynamics, but supposedly only up to a limit: they claim that if you try to make the resolution too high, the model dynamics will no longer improve due to numerical instabilities.

Whether that claim is actually true has been debated elsewhere (e.g., on RealClimate). Gavin Schmidt, for instance, cites a 2006 paper by Jablonowski and Williamson, which runs models at much higher resolutions and finds no such instability. Browning claims that they haven't yet reached the "critical resolution" where you run into problems, but that's sort of moot; the models in that intercomparison are already at much higher resolution than what climate models run at.

But even if B&K's claim is true, it doesn't imply that current climate models have no predictive skill. It only means that there is a limit to how much their accuracy can be improved by increasing their resolution past a certain point. Some people have proposed increasing their resolution to the mesoscale (i.e., the resolution of weather models), where B&K claim their criticisms apply, but this has not yet been done.

One line from India's NAPCC: "The national target of area under forest and tree cover is 33% while the current area under forests is 23%." Or another: "In order to respond effectively to the challenge of climate change, the Government has created an Advisory Council on Climate Change, chaired by the Prime Minister.

Really, this is not that embarrassing. A country whose per capita emissions are 1/15 of ours, whose citizens are using around 600 watts, has a climate action plan--and we don't?

"Got any models that have actually predicted accurately over a 10 year period?"

Maybe you can explain to us in your own words which models predicted climate inaccurately, and how. After all, you were the one making the claim in the first place.

Lepus:

"Maybe it is time to lose the tinfoil hats."

Lepus, this is India we're talking about! India, the home of the original Tree-Huggers! Again, if you connect the dots (...), you find that they're inextricably linked to various Soviet puppetmasters. By this impeccable logic, we still need tinfoil hats.

"Referring to a later attempt to assassinate the businessman Boris Berezovsky, who employed Litvinenko, the security source said the "continued willingness" of the domestic security branch the FSB to "consider operations against people in the West" was causing major diplomatic problems."

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.